Mary Baker Eddy was raised in a Puritan home and loved and studied the Bible. Throughout her life, she questioned conventional views about science, theology, and medicine and continually searched the Bible for answers. One overarching question she sought to answer was: How was Christ Jesus able to heal the sick?
She found the answer in when she had a severe fall and was not expected to live. She went on to become a widely-known speaker, healer, teacher and author, establishing the Christian Science Church and its many publications, including the award-winning newspaper, The Christian Science Monitor.
When she was critically injured in , she turned to God with her whole heart. She saw that God, Spirit, is the only reality. And she was completely healed. She wanted to understand what happened, so she studied the Bible and found universal and dependable laws of God. These laws are the foundation of Christian Science. Since then many people have been healed and redeemed as they learn about their relationship to God through this reliable Science of Christianity.
So did the softening of some Christian Science attitudes suggest that the church was undergoing a genuine change of heart? Or were they trying to save their jobs, their pride and the institution? At that time, officials were grasping at relationships with ecumenical groups and New Age alternative healers — anything to boost membership. Many in the congregation resisted. In , Paulson spoke of trying to drag Christian Science into the modern age.
The church deserves to die, and it is dying. T oward the end, my father was under the care of first one, then another practitioner, and they seemed to have set him a number of tasks. Practitioners commonly assign strange forms of mental homework, asking patients to recall previous healings, or things they are grateful for.
There were exactly 11, some dated. My grandfather always spoke of rejecting medicine by walking out of a US army hospital in France, past scores of patients stacked in the halls. Doctors, examining x-rays, said that the arm had been broken badly, but that somehow it had set itself. Immobilising the arm in a cast, they predicted it would take many weeks to mend.
Their predictions proved to be greatly exagerated [sic] and despite their concerns, the arm has been completely useful for over 50 years. The list was typical of the way Christian Scientists interpret physical recovery — however imaginary, imperfect or incomplete — as a spiritual triumph. Two other healings during the mids involved a self-diagnosed heart attack and a case of rheumatic fever, a condition rare in this country due to antibiotics.
The rheumatic fever was prolonged. For nearly a year, while serving as First Reader in his church, he experienced severe joint pain and near-immobility. When he recovered, he was proud of being able to climb a nearby mountain, Mount Si. This was considered such a marvellous healing that Mother Church officials interviewed him about it. A transcript of the interview survives in his papers. If it was indeed rheumatic fever and the symptoms he described match that condition , it may have caused ongoing scarring of the heart valves, leading to poor circulation in the extremities, and ultimately gangrene.
In coping with his situation, it was hard not to respond with the same blank disconnection that he himself brought to it. When pressed to deal with reality, he fell back on bullying, irritably refusing all but the most trivial forms of help mainly food , responding to expressions of alarm and concern not with kindness, but with sarcasm and contempt.
But that was who he was. He had always been abusive and full of rage. Whatever he experienced then, I can only imagine, but I know what it made him. And yet it was difficult to watch his self-neglect without feeling the desperation and horror of it. For a time he spent days sitting up, on the edge of the bed or in a chair, bent over, sometimes rocking back and forth and groaning. On the phone, he wept often, sounding weak or faint.
He had lost a lot of weight and was flat on his back in bed. When I first sat down, I thought something had fallen to the floor beside him. Then I realised it was his foot, resting there, wrapped unrecognisably in blue bandages almost to the knee, with scabbed flesh showing at the top. He was breathing heavily, summoning energy to answer my questions. In some ways, he was his old self. I had brought him the free peanuts from my flight, and he shook a few in his hand, whisking them back and forth in his palm in a reflexive, almost jaunty, gesture.
But it was not a mood he could sustain. When I returned a few days later, he was worse, grimacing often, speaking only in terse, telegraphic bursts. When I returned, he was no better. Over the coming days, he periodically stopped eating, speaking in monosyllables.
He died on 20 April Aided and abetted by his religion, my father killed himself in the slowest and most excruciating way possible. Sometime after his death, I dreamed about him. I was alone in a warehouse — a dark, menacing space — and in it my father had dissolved into a miasma, covering the floor with a kind of deadly, toxic slime.
Somehow, I was tasked with the problem of cleaning it up, without ever touching it. It was, of course, impossible. That is where Christian Science leaves us.
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